Page:The Catalpa Expedition (1897).djvu/247

Rh them that he felt as he spoke, he would shake hands with them all. He was followed by Thomas Riley, Esq., who began by likening the cause of Ireland to that patriotic society whose birth antedated that of George III., and which still lived on. The spirit of Irish liberty was not dead, as was proved by their presence there that night to do honor to a man and an act. The achievement of Mr. Breslin was worthy of the annals of an earlier era. Ireland's history was one of oppression. An Englishman had once charged that the Irish were "an unpolished nation;" to which a native of Ireland replied, "It ought not to be so, for we have received hard rubs enough to be polished long ago." It was acts like Mr. Breslin's that kept alive the spirit of liberty. Plantagenet and Tudor, and Stuart and Cromwell, all had dealt Ireland crushing blows, all had waded through seas of Irish gore; yet all their dynasties had perished off the face of the earth, and the spirit of Irish liberty still survived. The worst of the Roman Emperors was Julian, yet he sent no Christian to the cross or the wild beasts, he merely banned and barred Christian education, for he well knew that without education a nation relapsed into the depths of barbarism. England had done the same; in her savage, barbarous penal code she had proscribed education and educators, but Ireland still clung to the light of liberty. She listened to the sound of the battle of freedom in the West, and her sons caught the flame, and Flood, and Grattan, and the Volunteers raised her to nationhood, and crowned her with the star of freedom. She had lost that eminence, but the spirit burned again in the immortal O'Connell; it still survived the golden-mouthed Father Burke. The speaker paid a touching tribute to the memory of John Mitchel, and denounced England as championing the iniquity of the age, of upholding dead and rotten Turkey and her butcheries, and that the hour of retribution had arrived, if Russia would only advance. If England lost her temper in the threatened European complication.